Instructors
Bussarawan Teerawichitchainan
Associate Professor
Dept of Sociology & Anthropology and Co-Director, CFPR
Bussarawan (Puk) Teerawichitchainan is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and the Centre for Family and Population Research at NUS. Her research interests lie at the intersection of family demography, social gerontology, population health, and social stratification. She conducts research on these topics mostly in the context of Southeast Asia. Her current research examines the roles of family, policy, and social structure in explaining the health and wellbeing of older persons in Southeast Asia. She uses methods of statistical analyses and a mixed-method approach combining population-level survey data with fieldwork and interviews. Prior to joining NUS in 2019, she was an Associate Professor of Sociology in the School of Social Sciences, SMU. She taught research techniques workshop on mixed-methods research for doctoral students at SMU for multiple years.
Vincent Chua
Associate Professor
Dept of Sociology & Anthropology and Co-Director, CFPR
Dr. Vincent Chua got his Ph.D. from the University of Toronto in Sociology. His research areas are social networks and social capital, neighborhood life, education, and ethnic stratification. His work has appeared in Social Networks, Social Science Research, Sociological Perspectives, Current Sociology, and International Studies in Sociology of Education, Comparative Sociology, Asian Ethnicity, American Behavioral Scientist, and the Sage Handbook of Social Network Analysis. He has taught the graduate-level quantitative data analysis course at the Department of Sociology in NUS for several years. In 2013, he won a teaching award in NUS.
Feng Qiushi
Associate Professor
Dept of Sociology & Anthropology and Deputy Director, CFPR
Dr. Feng Qiushi has won the faculty teaching award in 2014 and 2016. He has been teaching Social Research Methods for many years, both at the undergraduate and graduate levels. He received a Ph.D. degree from Duke University with research fields of aging studies and economic sociology. Publishing extensively, Dr. Feng now serves in the journal editorial board for BMC Geriatrics, Journal of Aging and Health, Research on Aging, and Asian Population Studies. He is also the co-editor of the book series, Advance in Studies of Aging and Health, published by Springer. His research has been funded by UNPF, MOE of Singapore, and GAI of NUS.
Narayanan Ganapathy
Associate Professor
Dept of Sociology & Anthropology, Associate Dean, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
Dr. Narayanan Ganapathy is also an Adjunct Professor of Law with the School of Justice, Queensland University of Technology, Brisbane, Australia. Dr. Ganapathy’s research and teaching interests are criminologies, sociology of crime and deviance, sociology of law and policing, juvenile justice, criminal gangs, and domestic violence. Dr. Ganapathy has won numerous teaching awards and was awarded the NUS Outstanding Educator Award in 2010. Dr. Ganapathy has published extensively in various international journals and, is a member of the Editorial Boards of The European Journal of Criminology, The Asian Journal of Criminology, and The International Journal of Comparative and Applied Criminal Justice. As a criminologist, Dr. Ganapathy has used a range of qualitative research methods such as participant observation, in-depth interviews, case study, among others, to investigate phenomena such as gangs, domestic violence, policing, and prisonization.
Tan Ern Ser
Associate Professor
Dept of Sociology & Anthropology, Steering Committee Member, CFPR; Deputy Chair, General Education Committee; and Academic Adviser, Social Lab, Institute of Policy Studies.
He teaches modules in social stratification, social policy, and social research methods. He has won several faculty-level teaching awards and a university-level teaching award.
He received his Ph.D. from Cornell University. He is the author of “Does Class Matter?” (2004) and “Class and Social Orientations” (2015).
Mike Cheung
Professor
Dept of Psychology and Steering Committee Member, CFPR
Prof Mike Cheung is a Full Professor at the Department of Psychology, National University of Singapore (NUS). His research expertise is in the areas of meta-analysis, structural equation modeling (SEM), and multilevel modeling. He has published more than 70 papers in international journals and a book on integrating meta-analysis with SEM by Wiley. He received the Award for Excellent Researcher from the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, NUS at 2012. Prof. Cheung teaches undergraduate and graduate research methods and statistics at NUS. He also regularly gives workshops on statistics. His profile is available at https://mikewlcheung.github.io.
Feng Chen-Chieh
Associate Professor
Dept of Geography
Dr. Chen-Chieh Feng is an Associate Professor in the Department of Geography at NUS. He completed a Ph.D. in Geography at the University at Buffalo, The State University of New York. His work has appeared in the journals International Journal of Geographic Information Science, Transactions in GIS, Computer, Environment, and Urban Systems, Urban Studies, Professional Geographers among others. Dr. Feng has taught various GIS at the graduate and undergraduate levels for over ten years at NUS. He has applied GIS in digital humanity, 3D modeling, social media analysis, and cultural heritage preservation, and published on geospatial methodologies in the journal Applied Geography and Remote Sensing. He has conducted training in the spatial analysis at universities.
Vineeta Sinha
Professor
Dept of Sociology & Anthropology; Head of South Asian Studies Programme
Professor Vineeta Sinha has been teaching at NUS for almost two decades. Her diverse teaching portfolio straddles undergraduate and graduate courses – which are methodological, theoretical, and substantive. In addition to classroom teaching experience, she also has extensive experience of supervising and guiding student research – at Honours, Masters, and Ph.D. levels. As a researcher, Prof. Sinha has applied a range of qualitative research methods (ethnography, historical research, and case study) in her own inquiries. As a practitioner, she has produced ethnographic knowledge and interpretation of the religious domain in the Diaspora. She obtained her M.Soc.Sci from the National University of Singapore and an M.A and Ph.D. in Anthropology from the Johns Hopkins University.
Eric Thompson
Associate Professor
Dept of Sociology & Anthropology
Dr. Eric C. Thompson completed a Ph.D. in sociocultural anthropology at the University of Washington and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Southeast Asian Studies, University of California Los Angeles. His work has appeared in the journals American Ethnologist, Urban Studies, Political Geography, Asian Studies Review, Contemporary Sociology, and Contemporary Southeast Asian Studies among others. Dr. Thompson has taught qualitative research methods at the graduate and undergraduate levels for over ten years at NUS. He has published on methodology in the journal Field Methods and conducted seminars and training in research methods at universities and for policy-oriented researchers in Indonesia, Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Singapore, and Vietnam.
Josh Ryan Watkins
Assistant Professor
Dept of Political Science
Dr. Josh Watkins is a Lecturer within the Department of Political Science and Global Studies at National University of Singapore, joining NUS in 2018. Prior to joining NUS, Dr. Watkins was a visiting Assistant Professor of Geography at Texas A&M University. Dr. Watkins received his PhD in Geography from the University of California, Davis.
Dr. Watkins’ research focuses on migration management, refugee and asylum-seeker policy, primarily deploying qualitative research methods with a specific emphasis on archival research and the critical discourse analysis of texts and images. Dr. Watkins has published in journals such as Geopolitics, Territory Politics Governance, Geography Compass, and Environment and Planning C: Space and Politics.
Leher Singh
Associate Professor
Dept of Psychology
Dr. Leher Singh is an Associate Professor of Psychology at the National University of Singapore. She earned her Ph.D. from Brown University (USA) in 2002, after which she served on the faculty of Boston University until 2010. Since 2010, she has directed the NUS Infant and Child Language Centre at NUS, where her team conducts research on early cognitive and language development. She has published over 60 research articles in peer-reviewed journals including Child Development, Developmental Psychology, and Developmental Science. Her research has received funding awards from the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation, and the Ministry of Education.
Denis Tkachenko
Assistant Professor
Dept of Economics
Dr. Tkachenko teaches in the Department of Economics at the National University of Singapore. He obtained his PhD from Boston University. At NUS, he teaches Econometrics, Economic Forecasting and Machine Learning classes at the advanced undergraduate level. He has published several papers on econometrics of dynamic economic models, including in the top five and top field economic journals.
Zhang Jin-Ting
Professor
Dept of Statistics and Applied Probability
Dr. Jin-Ting Zhang has published extensively and served on the editorial boards of several international statistical journals. He is the author of a recent monograph: Analysis of Variance for Functional Data published by Chapman and Hall, 2014. He is also the co-author of Nonparametric Regression Methods for Longitudinal Data Analysis: Mixed-Effect Modelling Approaches (2006, Wiley Series in Probability and Statistics) and the coeditor of Advances in Statistics: Proceedings of the Conference in Honor of Professor Zhidong Bai on His 65th Birthday, National University of Singapore, 20 July 2008. Dr. Zhang joined NUS at the end of 2000 and he has taught a number of modules, including Regression analysis, Generalized linear regression, Nonparametric regression Categorical data analysis, Computer-aided data analysis, Computer intensive data analysis, and Bayesian statistics among others.
Ho Swee Lin
Associate Professor
Dept of Sociology & Anthropology
Dr. Ho teaches in the Department of Sociology at the National University of Singapore. Her research interests and publications cover topics on the neoliberal transformations of work, friendship practices; the urban night economy; ethnographic field methods; ‘studying up;’ the globalization of East Asian popular culture; social formations of gender; changing corporate cultures; the political economy of Western classical music; and global food cultures. Dr. Ho worked for many years in various countries as auditor, financial journalist, and corporate executive before completing her graduate studies at Sophia University (Japan), and later at the University of Oxford. She has taught in South Korea, where she was also Korea Foundation Research Fellow.
Mu Zheng
Assistant Professor
Dept of Sociology & Anthropology
Dr. Mu Zheng is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology and Anthropology and a member of the steering committee of the Centre for Family and Population Research at NUS. Her general research interests include trends, social determinants, and consequences of marriage and family behaviors, with a special focus on how marriage and family have served as major inequality-generating mechanisms. Her ongoing research projects examine how interactions between sociodemographic and ideational contexts shape individuals’ time use patterns, family experiences, and well-being in China and Singapore. She uses methods of statistical analysis, qualitative interviews, and a mixed-method approach combining population-level survey data with fieldwork and interviews.